Ugly Talk

Episode 15 - Twin Peaks and the MICE Quotient

Released: Jun 21, 2017

Hello internet! We return to you this summer to talk about the return of a revered but short series from the 1990s. Twin Peaks was a TV series by David Lynch and Mark Frost about the murder of the Homecoming Queen Laura Palmer in the sleepy town of Twin Peaks, Washington. We share the experiences and explore the town through Dale Cooper, a federal agent called in to investigate the murder.

The M.I.C.E. quotient is a writing foundation credited to Orson Scott Card, known most notably for his science fiction series Ender's Game. The basic idea as listed in the acronym is that every story seed falls into the categories of milieu, idea, character, or event. You will have many of these story ideas overlapping and building upon one another in the course of your story, but the important thing is that you resolve them in the reverse of the order you introduce them.

The structure of the early episodes and the subsequent failure of Twin Peaks can be heavily traced to MICE (among other things), and in this episode, we will discuss MICE through Twin Peaks, and how you can apply it to your own writing.